Redesigning the Bay Area Video Coalition

Making Users Feel at Home

The Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) is a youthful, vibrant organization that’s focused on people. Chapter Three created an inviting website to engage users with BAVC’s media and showcase its culture and expertise. We migrated content from their Drupal 6 site and developed a new information architecture to make it easy for users to sign up for classes, make donations, and find jobs, and for admins to update.

Radical Content Reorganization

During the strategy and research phase, our team assessed BAVC’s existing content and goals. We created a new sitemap that combined, consolidated and simplified five years worth of content, making it easier to find and manage.

A Workhorse Website

With over 7,000 hours of media, BAVC’s site is big by definition. To accommodate this massive amount of content, we paid special attention to organization and ease of use, elevating the visuals and reducing the word counts.

A Searchable Media Library

BAVC teaches media production, but its video library looked like an afterthought. We organized the large library of BAVC media, adding metadata to improve searchability. The new metadata taxonomies make it easy for admins to credit authors and associate videos with programs, making it easier for users to find what they want.

A Bigger, Bolder Video Presentation

To appeal to BAVC’s media savvy users, we used a minimalist design and vibrant, saturated color to express energy and creativity. We made the video presentation bigger, bolder and more beautiful. Clear, simple icons make it easy for users to find content and let us present vast amounts of information on pages that still feel open and inviting.

A Simple Administrative Experience

We engineered reusable, structured content blocks so BAVC content administrators have maximum flexibility while maintaining design consistency. Admins don’t have to know how to code, they can simply type or copy new content into reusable blocks.

Integrated Business Logic

The public interacts with the BAVC website in many ways so gathering, managing and presenting user data is critical. Stored in Salesforce databases, user data is pulled into Drupal and then displayed. We wrote custom code to extend the Salesforce module capability, preserving years of Salesforce history and historical data about programs, instructors, and attendees.

Thinking Ahead

We delivered a website that’s future-facing; as BAVC grows and changes, so will its website. Our redesign optimized the mobile experience, making it easy to sign up for a class on your phone. The new BAVC site is about welcoming people and making it easy for them to get around and find what they need. This new BAVC website is about change. It’s about what’s to come.